Off to Be the Wizard — Metadata

Orientation

Martin Kenneth Banks is a twenty-three-year-old Seattle hacker who pokes around the internet "for kicks" and stumbles onto a file — Repository1-c.txt — that turns out to be the source code for reality. Edit a number, change the world: he can teleport, levitate, and pad his bank account. When the Department of the Treasury and Seattle PD start closing in, Martin escapes the only way he can think of — he punches his coordinates back to twelfth-century England and sets up shop as a wizard. He quickly learns he is not the first nerd to have this idea: a couple dozen "wizards" from various future decades already live across medieval Europe, organized into a quiet fraternity centered on the village of Leadchurch. Under the gruff mentorship of Phillip, Martin trains for a formal trial, navigates wizard etiquette and a love interest in the seamstress Gwen, and is eventually pulled into a confrontation with Jimmy — the most powerful of the wizards, currently advising King Arthur as Merlin in a London he has renamed Camelot — whose ambitions are starting to break the rules and hurt people.

Cover-at-a-glance

The original 47North 2014 cover (concept by Scott Meyer himself) is proudly retro pixel art — a frozen frame from a fictional late-80s / early-90s console-RPG. A small pixel-sprite wizard stands center-low on a winding ochre path: navy conical hat with three small white stars, yellow-blonde hair pixels, dark teal tunic, muted blue-grey pants, holding a brown wooden staff with a glowing white orb. Behind him a chunky forest-green hill rises to a flat charcoal pixel silhouette of a ruined castle, against a saturated sky-blue background dotted with white pixel-block clouds. Dark cliff edges flank the path like an RPG screen border. The title "OFF TO BE THE / WIZARD" sits at the top in a clean modern white sans-serif (the joke: chunky 8-bit world, sleek modern label) and "SCOTT MEYER" matches at the bottom. Mood is comedic, nostalgic, knowingly nerdy — Dragon Warrior meets Quest for Glory meets a sticky-note about reality being a computer program.

Visual DNA to inherit on all generated images:

• Pure pixel art / 8-bit-RPG screenshot rendering — chunky pixels, hard edges, no anti-aliasing inside shapes, visible pixel grid is the point.
• Limited saturated palette: sky-blue / forest-green / sandy-ochre / charcoal / navy hat / yellow hair / dark teal / blue-grey / brown / glowing white.
• Flat ambient daylight; depth conveyed entirely through silhouette and 1–2 tones per region.
• Poster-like, frozen-game-screen staging: low horizon, hero center-low, distant landmark up top.
• Comedic-nerdy mood — adventurous and bright, never grim. Computer-meets-medieval winks (terminal-green glyphs over parchment, a Commodore 64 behind a crystal ball, etc.) are welcome and should be rendered in pixel-art language too.
• Not vector cartoon, not painted illustration, not modern hi-res "neo-pixel."